I have a friend who’s bigger than me. He’s in his fifties and has big arms, big legs, and a convex belly that’s soft to curl up against. It’s Sunday today, so he’ll probably be running 12 miles this afternoon — he’s training for the Alcatraz Triathlon. This would probably concern me (they built that prison on that island so people would DIE if they tried to escape and swim away!!), except that he’s already done it twice.
I have another friend who’s petite, thin, and beautiful. Her arms, legs, and belly are small and firm, and they look like they came straight off an airbrushed magazine cover. She’s in her thirties, and she will probably be thin and gorgeous her entire life. She never ever exercises, and she eats whatever she wants.
The idea that body size and body fitness are separate things is a fairly new concept for me. I grew up thinking that big meant bad (lazy, unhealthy, ugly) and small meant good (active, healthy, beautiful). Unfortunately, at 5’10” with a large bone structure, it didn’t really matter how much I exercised, I was always going to be big.
My mother and I spent a long time being at odds with each other on this subject (we’re now on neutral, mutually-respectful territory, and I should mention she’ll probably read this post — hi Mom!). She, too, was conditioned by experiences and culture to equate big with bad and small with good, and she passed some of that on to me. More than that, though, she believed that exercising makes you happier (it does), and hoped to heal some of my adolescent depression by encouraging me to go to the gym. Her intentions were in the right place, but when paired with the “big = bad” philosophy, this encouragement just poked more holes in my self-esteem. She was saying, “I want you to love yourself more,” and I heard, “You’re not good enough the way you are.”
I probably don’t have to explain how any attempt to express, “You should go to a gym,” can easily come out wrong. But it’s worth mentioning that even her attempts at positive reinforcement were thwarted by the screwed up body image culture. I heard any compliment about my body (“You’ve gotten skinnier!”) as “What you weigh is very important to me.” This further reinforced the big = bad, small = good problem, and reminded me that I’ll always be big. You can’t win at a game with broken rules.
Moving to San Francisco and meeting phenomenal people like Debbie Notkin and Laurie Toby Edison (who put out a beautiful book of artsy nude photos of fat women called Women En Large, and who also write the body image activist blog, Body Impolitic) changed a lot for me. They explained to me that our cultural aversion to large bodies is severely disproportionate to our interest in being healthy, and that a lot of the time the two are completely unrelated. Debbie and Laurie’s work also helped me unlock another part of my brain that had been shamed into hibernation: I find confident, curvy women hot! Even further? Big men are hot, too.
Posted in Adventures | 
16 Comments » | March 22nd, 2009
I just got back to San Francisco after that three-week emotional roller-coaster. In a nutshell: I got to NH just in time (thanks to you). I held my grandmother as she died. I picked out her casket. I